Yuri Gagarin, the world’s first cosmonaut, lends his name to Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh’s entrancing debut feature, and to the real-life housing project in which it’s set. An artefact of French communism in the 1960s, Gagarin himself attended the estate’s opening, tying the Soviet ambitions of technological advancement and communal unity into one big home. A home that, almost 60 years later, a teenager is trying to save.
Youri (Alseni Bathily), a resident of the Gagarine estate, is on a mission. A mission (which compared to that of his Space Race-hero namesake is arguably small) that Liatard and Trouilh land with similar emotional heft to more familiar space adventures like Contact or Apollo 13, without ever leaving the ground. Left to fend for himself after his mother leaves, Youri takes on restoring the estate to its former glory, to save it from demolition. Recruiting co-resident Houssam (Jamil McCraven) and scrappage aficionado Diana (Lyna Khoudri) for a montage of light bulb-changes, wire-clipping and paint-rolling, we see Youri’s own quietly passionate and dedicated brand of the Right Stuff.
Alseni Bathily brings a gentle physicality and quiet enthusiasm to the role of Youri.
A big space nerd, Youri views the Gagarine estate through a stunning lens, the orange brickwork burning on screen like the Martian surface; he treads through it in his blue Adidas space suit, the camera floating around as if in zero gravity. Frustratingly wrenched into these hypnotic scenes comes archival footage of spaceship and urban destruction, unnecessarily underlining Youri’s position and breaking the rhythm of the tale, and Bathily’s compelling performance.
Compared to the macho figures or clichéd geeks normally recruited to lead an on-screen space exploration, Bathily brings a gentle physicality and quiet enthusiasm to the role, in a performance that grows in depth as the film becomes more melancholy and fantastical. As a last line of defence, he holes up inside the estate, converting it into a private space station; his vibrant interior world clashing with the harshness of reality, shifting the film’s finale into a magical-realist triumph. It’s rarely been as exciting to be so down to earth.